There has been a significant increase in the number or companies leveraging hybrid IT – or the ability to burst to the public cloud to meet fluctuating computing and business requirements, according to a survey of 1,200 global organizations from IT monitoring software provider ScienceLogic.
The survey also revealed that while adoption is exploding and investment increasing, most enterprises are unable to monitor and control the accompanying sprawl, lack hybrid IT management skills, and do not have proper visibility into their clouds – all resulting in significant infrastructure availability and performance risk.
In addition, the study found 81 percent of companies are using public clouds today, to establish a hybrid environment, but one of every three enterprises report that they don’t have the capacity today to monitor their hybrid infrastructures.
“Most business will need to initially migrate part of their IT to the public cloud, in order to become hybrid,” Yama Habibzai, chief marketing officer for ScienceLogic, told eWeek. “During the migration process, they need to make sure that data is not lost, along the way and that they have a safe migration. Because many of the securities may get set up after the migration, it is critical to protect the data during the migration.”
One out of three said they are not adequately trained and skilled to manage hybrid environments, and a third of companies using public clouds now have more than 25 percent of all IT resources in the cloud.
Around three-quarters (72 percent of those companies using public clouds expect to increase their cloud spending over the next year and 62 percent of all companies using public clouds reported not having cloud monitoring plans in place.
“Hybrid IT will not be just a public cloud and private cloud – it will be between multi-clouds. We are already seeing organizations who have a private cloud, but their public cloud resources are distributed between AWS, Azure, VMware, Google and others,” Habibzai said. “The future will a multi-cloud world. Even today, CIO’s underestimate the number of cloud based applications running in their environments. Usually its a 10-fold increase compared to what is assumed. And those verities of applications will run in a verity of clouds.”
Just one in four respondents reported that they were successfully monitoring their cloud resources, and 40 percent of companies using public clouds today do not know what corporate assets are currently residing in the cloud.
In addition, 42 percent of companies using public clouds today believe that there is greater risk in public versus private clouds.
“There needs to be greater visibility for organization of their workloads in the public clouds. They need to have more control of those resources, and they need trust the systems more,” Habibzai explained. “Hybrid IT is not just about pure IT cost control, but a business need to be focused on efficiency, uptime and the speed at which problems are resolved, which all lead to more revenue and less cost of running IT.”